No Business Like Show Business
by VampirePam
Summary: When Hawkeye goes missing and manages to get himself a concussion, BJ abandons his traditional stance of calm and moves heaven and earth to bring him back safely. BJ's POV for the episode "Hawkeye".


Hawkeye had been gone for six hours when the note came - not that BJ had been counting. Things were just so much...quieter when his bunkmate was off site. Every now and again, he would even get desperate enough to attempt banter with Radar (the results were, perhaps, predictable).

This day's silence was particularly unbearable, unbroken even by the whirr of chopper blades or shouts of desperate medical personnel. So when hours one and two had come and gone with Hawkeye still not back, BJ may have casually mentioned the matter to Colonel Potter. Two or three times. Every fifteen minutes.

After hours three and four, he may have ordered - _requested, _rather - that Radar place phone calls to supply, a couple nearby patrolling units...and eventually anyone else either of them could think of fighting on the right side in a thirty mile radius.

So when the flap of the communications tent flew open, bringing with it Colonel Potter, a young Korean girl, and a note, BJ was relieved - an answer. Fewer things the doctor in him hated more than the dearth of an answer.

That is, until he read it. Until he saw those desperate words, penned in a sloping hand significantly more sprawling than Hawkeye's ever was, and a wave of nausea washed over him.

BJ's hand gripped Radar's shoulder like iron as the note fell from his fingers. "Ask her if she can take us there."

"Geez, you don't have to hold on so tight!" Radar yelped, jumping back a pace.

"Go on, son." Potter interjected. He placed a calming hand on BJ's arm. "Sounds like we're on a clock here."

"Yes, sir!" Radar squeaked. Stammered Korean spilled from his mouth in the direction of the girl, who responded with a few words and a series of nods.

"She can take us there!" Papers flew in all directions as Radar flew across the desk to grab his helmet. "She can take - permission to go retrieve Captain Hawkeye, sir?"

"Permission granted, damn it!" Potter thrust a ring of keys in Radar's direction. "Go bring him home."

BJ did not request his own permission; ignoring a request denied was an actionable offense...and there was no way in hell he wasn't going. The small, paternal nod Potter sent him, however, made it clear that any worry had been needless.

They flew down the highway at a speed even BJ couldn't object to; with Radar driving and the girl in the front seat, he was left alone in the back with the torrent of thoughts rushing through his panicking brain.

He'll be fine_. But he's all alone. _

He's a grown man, a doctor._ Yeah, with a scrambled brain._

He can take care of himself._ Hah, since when? _

Stop worrying._ Not gonna happen._

The screech of tires brought him back to the world with a jolt. BJ blinked. The girl had jumped down and was scampering off toward what must have been home. Radar, meanwhile, was on his hands and knees on the ground, undoubtedly searching for the glasses which always seemed to be flying off his face.

And there, stumbling woozily out of the modest dwelling, was Hawkeye. BJ was out of the jeep and across the terrain in seconds - which was good, considering he soon became the only thing separating his friend from the ground.

"Beej!" Hawkeye's arms splayed themselves loosely around his shoulders. "You fink! You missed your cue - I've been doing a solo act for a couple hours! If you think you're still getting half the tips, you're _nuts_."

"Easy, Hawk." B.J. didn't like the dreamy look on Hawkeye's face or the slur in his voice one bit. His fears only doubled when the fingers examining the back of Hawkeye's head found his hair matted with dried blood. "Just take it easy."

"Easy? I'll show you 'easy'!" Hawkeye twisted in his arms to make a jerky, bowing motion to the empty countryside. "For my next trick, watch me pull a concussion out of a hat!"

He leaned sideways against B.J. and mumbled, "Psst, you got a hat?"

"I must have left it in my other pants," BJ returned numbly. The only coherent thought in his head was getting Hawkeye back to base - and soon. "Why don't we go look for it together?"

He tightened his arms around his friend and began to maneuver him toward the Jeep. Hawkeye, however, was having none of it.

"Oh, don't pull me away now!" Hawkeye reached his hands into the air, as if seeking benediction. "Can't you hear that roar of applause?"

And there it was - the crash. Hawkeye's facade of manic glee cracked, leaving only two things BJ hated seeing there: pain and fear. His arms dropped, while his body, drained of its borrowed strength, sagged against BJ's as he murmured, "Or maybe the pounding in my head has simply acquired a drum section."

"Your head's going to be just fine, drum section or no." He carded his fingers carefully through Hawkeye's hair and hoped desperately Hawkeye was in no condition to recall his abysmal bluffing skills. "Which is more than will be said for me if you leave me alone with Frank a minute longer."

"Ah, Old Ferret Face," Hawkeye mumbled into BJ's shirt. "I'm going to miss him most of all." The hand gripping the shirt, meanwhile, slackened noticeably. BJ felt his stomach drop.

"That's it, I'm cutting this performance short." He braced a hand against Hawkeye's side and laboriously pivoted them both toward the jeep. "Radar! Little help, please!"

"Sorry, sir!" Radar squeaked, scraping his knees in the dirt in his rush to help lever Hawkeye into the backseat. "Gee, Hawkeye, it sure is good to see you in one piece. Well, almost one piece. I mean - gosh, you know what I mean!"

"Sure, I know what you mean, Radar." Hawkeye's voice faded in and out, a patchy radio transmission. "You always did know how to make a guy feel welcome."

"Get the engine running, I've got him." Since Hawkeye's semi-conscious form seemed incapable of keeping a safe position for more than a few seconds, BJ made the executive decision to climb in, too.

"Well, well, fancy meeting you here!" Hawkeye's smile crooked a little to the left, but was a welcome sight nonetheless. "What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?"

BJ couldn't resist brushing the hair out of Hawkeye's eyes before replying: "My mother's dead set on me marrying a doctor. Back of a MASH jeep seemed a good place to meet one."

"If I come across any, I'll be sure and point 'em your way." Hawkeye jabbed a shaky index finger into BJ's collarbone, before letting his hand flatten and rest there. "You deserve it."

An unexpected bump in the road had BJ scrambling to keep Hawkeye from flying headfirst out of the jeep. The result was a position rather more intimate than he had originally intended, but BJ couldn't say he minded.

Hawkeye rested his head against BJ's chest and began to hum a little. The tune stirred something in the back of BJ's mind, but it took the words for him to place it.

"_The headaches_ \- ooh, too close - _the heartache, the backaches, the flops, the sheriff that escorts you out of town_," Hawkeye sang softly. "C'mon, Beej, you know this one."

"You go on without me," BJ said. Hawkeye's flagging energy had him too preoccupied to feel much like singing. "I'll jump in on the second chorus."

"_There's no business like show business like no business I know_..." Hawkeye trailed off abruptly, his head lolling back limply.

"Hawkeye? Hawk!" BJ shook him first gently, then with increasing urgency. He swore, took a deep breath, and tried a desperate measure. "_Everything about it is...appealing? Everything the..." _Oh hell, what was next? "_Everything the..."_

"_Everything the traffic will allow," _Hawkeye finished for him."You wouldn't last five minutes at the Boston Opera House." The relieved laugh BJ let out was dangerously close to a sob.

"Oh yeah?" he said, after taking a moment to compose himself. "Tell you what, when we make it back home, come open call time, I'll stumble onto that stage and prove you wrong."

"Home..." A little smile played across Hawkeye's face for a moment, before fading away into something sadder. "Beej, I gotta ask you a favor. A real one."

"Uh-oh. That sounds serious." BJ curled his fingers around the ones Hawkeye had tangled in his shirt. "And I've been figuring the war'll be lost the day Hawkeye Pierce stops making jokes."

"I won't tell the North Koreans if you won't," Hawkeye retorted, before growing serious once more. "Say you'll do it. You gotta." The fingers beneath his began to shake.

"Okay, Hawk, okay." BJ shifted Hawkeye to a more comfortable position and tightened his grip. "Whatever you need, you got it."

"If it comes down to it...make them send me back," he swallowed hard, then continued, "back to my dad. I want to see Crabapple Cove again, even if it is the wrong way round. You promise?"

"C'mon Hawk, don't talk like that." _Please don't. I can't do this without you. _"You're going to be fine, just _fine_, you hear me?"

"But if I'm _not_..." Hawkeye's voice had begun to fade out again. "Promise, you gotta...gotta promise." His eyes fluttered shut, head dropping forward onto BJ's chest. 

"Hawkeye?" BJ rushed two fingers to the side of Hawkeye's neck, only to find his pulse sluggish and thready; a hand to his forehead revealed similarly clammy skin, "Come on, Hawkeye, stay with me. Stay with me!"

Four months in Korea, he'd been shot at, bombed out, shaken to pieces on a weekly basis. Elbows deep in blood and guts, of teenagers more often than not - it was enough to drive a fellow crazy.

But in that moment, clutching the unconscious body of the only person in the world who could keep the madness away, BJ Hunnicutt could say one thing for certain: he had never, not in four months, not in the years leading up to them, been _this._ _goddamn. scared. _

"Radar!" he shouted, never taking his eyes off Hawkeye. "I'm losing him back here - step on it, and that's an order!"

BJ's iron grip on his patient would come in handy as the jeep surged jerkily forward, Radar coaxing the temperamental machine into a level of performance it surely hadn't shown in years.

It was probably only ten or fifteen minutes until they reached the camp, but to BJ it was an eternity. Every groan or sigh from Hawkeye sent twin daggers of relief and worry into his gut.

The doctor in him knew that the chances of serious complication from such a concussion were slim. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that the medical man in his head had ceded control to another - less rational and far more invested in the prognosis of this particular patient.

It was that man who hurled himself out of the jeep before it was even stopped, Hawkeye in his arms, and shouted for help until his throat was raw and half the camp had come running. That man, too, who nearly slugged an ensign for suggesting he take a break and let someone else handle things.

Only when Hawkeye had been thoroughly examined, his vitals monitored, wound cleaned and bandaged, and all any of them could do was wait and hope - only then did BJ yield. Truthfully, had anyone less than Colonel Potter been suggesting it, he probably wouldn't have agreed

"Come on, son." Potter's hand on his shoulder began to guide him gently, but firmly out of post-op and toward his office. "Why don't you wait in here with me? They'll send somebody in when there's something to report."

Any protest died on his tongue as the remainder of the adrenaline drained from his body. Deprived of a task to put his hands to, BJ was lost. He supposed allowing Colonel Potter to sit him down and bring him a tall glass of water and a short glass of scotch couldn't hurt anything.

"Drink up, whichever you need more - and that's an order." Potter stared him down until he knocked back a slug of the scotch, savoring the familiar burn in his throat. "The heart-to-heart is an optional chaser, but highly recommended."

"Let me guess - you're going to tell me not to worry." Maybe if he said it enough times, it would happen. "That we have a top-notch team of doctors and nurses more than capable of treating what is probably a routine concussion."

"Not too far from the mark at all," Potter admitted, pouring himself a tumbler to match BJ's. "All right, hotshot, what should I to say next?"

BJ sighed. A little time to consider the afternoon's events had him more than a little ashamed of his behavior. "You _should_ give me a dressing down for how I've acted today."

"Hunnicutt, let me tell you something." Potter took a long sip of his scotch before continuing. "I've been in this business for over forty years. And in that time, I have seen countless men do a _hell_ of a lot worse in your shoes than shouting at a few colleagues."

Potter rose and crossed to BJ, clapping a paternal hand on his shoulder. "Cut yourself a break, son. Hell, a blind man could see how close you are to Hawkeye. Only natural you should be upset."

BJ was weighing how to best express his gratitude when Radar burst into the room and his train of thought simultaneously. "Sorry to interrupt, sirs, but I thought you'd wanna know - he's awake!"

With a brief, grateful glance at Potter, BJ sprang up from his seat and rushed to the doorway...when a thought froze him in his tracks. He could barely get out the words. "Can he...I mean, is he..."

"Asking for you, Captain Hunnicutt." Radar was practically beaming. "_Radar, tell my knight in shining armor to park his white charger in here for a minute_ or something like that...I didn't really understand."

BJ laughed, releasing the breath he hadn't consciously been holding, and pronounced, "If I'm a knight, you're a prince, Radar." He pressed a giddy kiss to the shocked corporal's cheek before sprinting out the door and into post-op.

The sight of Hawkeye, sitting up in bed and chatting up one of the nurses as if nothing had happened, momentarily stole BJ's breath again. Waves of relief crashing over him, BJ was grateful that Hawkeye's attention was currently fixated elsewhere - last thing he needed was someone else's _feelings _of an unfortunate nature to deal with.

In a flash, Hawkeye caught sight of him - and sent BJ a loopy grin that had his stomach doing flips. "There you are!" he pronounced. "I almost turned back into a pumpkin!"

"I think you're mixing your stories," BJ observed, gladly taking the opportunity to grab the seat beside Hawkeye's bed. "No knights in Cinderella."

"Weren't there? Must be this cracked noggin of mine. Got a cure for that, Prince Charming?"

_A kiss is traditional. _The words sprinted across his mind before BJ had a chance to catch them. He hoped fervently he wasn't blushing.

"I'll see if the Fairy Godmother has anything in the back for you." Hoping to steer his train of thought onto safer tracks, BJ ran a hand carefully along Hawkeye's hairline, "In the meantime, why don't you let me take a look?"

"I normally don't let a guy see my gaping head wounds on a first date," Hawkeye quipped as he leaned forward, "but you're awful cute. Just don't go getting ideas."

"I'll try to control myself." BJ tried not to think about the potential truth of that statement as he shifted the edge of the bandage to get a look beneath them. To his relief, the laceration appeared to be healing nicely - he made a mental note to ask Peg to send him enough cookies for the whole damn camp.

"Mind you, don't try _too_ hard." He could hear the smile in Hawkeye's voice. "I still have my girish pride."

"I think you're safe there," BJ proclaimed, as he leaned back. His hand ran itself lightly down Hawkeye's arm of its own accord. "You look good, Hawk. Really."

"Yeah, well..." Hawkeye's smile dimmed a little. "I don't know how good I'd look if it wasn't for you. Things were looking _pretty_ dire for old Hawkeye when you showed up."

He laid his hand lightly in BJ's before murmuring, "Thanks, Beej. I guess I owe you one."

If Hawkeye noticed the shiver he sent up BJ's arm, he was kind enough not to mention it. "Some night soon, you buy me a drink at Rosie's, and we'll call it even. After all, you've saved my butt more times than I can count - least I can do is return the favor."

"Well, that was purely selfish on my part." Hawkeye leaned in to whisper confidentially, "It's a very nice butt."

BJ cursed the blush that was creeping up his cheeks and muttered quickly, "Welcome back, Hawk," before turning to leave.

"Glad to be back, Beej," Hawkeye called after him, before requesting of the room at large, "Now which of you lovely ladies wants to give me my sponge bath?"

BJ gratefully made his way back to the comparative sanity of his tent, empty for once. The minute his head hit the pillow, he realized how exhausting several hours of non-stop worrying could be.

The rational part of his nature acknowledged that the consequences of today's adventure would have to be dealt with - sooner rather than later. The rest of him, however, was just _tired. _And if Hawkeye's face was the last thing on his mind before he drifted off, well, he'd worry about that tomorrow.


End file.
